Houston voted worst coffee city in the country: survey

HOUSTON - Houston has a lot of great things to brag about, but coffee isn't one of them. A new survey finds the Bayou City is the worst coffee city in the country, and the designation is brewing some discontent in the city's coffee shops.

At Three Keys Coffee, in downtown Houston's Fin Hall, a freshly brewed and poured cappuccino is available as quickly as the barista can craft it. The price tag is just $4.50. That's a bargain compared to the coffee survey from Clever Real Estate, which examined cappuccino prices in the nation's top 50 cities, the number of shops and roasters per capita, and Yelp reviews, among eight different metrics. They found Houston coffee's expensive, below-average, with not enough shops to caffeinate the 4th largest city in the country.

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"When it comes to coffee, it sort of underperforms a lot of the metrics that we use to measure how good of a coffee city someplace is," says Clever's Matt Brannon.

Tio Fallen, who started Three Keys Coffee with his wife, takes the news personally. "It's kinda' disrespectful to Houston, the Houston coffee culture, and the Houston coffee scene," he says.

Besides brewing, the couple also roasts award-winning coffee for mail order. Fallen believes the survey rewards communities that are oversaturated with choices, rather than Houston's quality destinations for coffee drinkers. "What you are going to have is really solid coffee," he says, "You can go into darn near any shop and have a really solid cup of joe."

On top of all that, the city is one of the nation's top locations for coffee imports, through the Port of Houston. People in the business say there might be some surprise about the high-quality beans that can be found here. "It's a chain of very skilled people that need to be in place, to enjoy a very good cup of coffee," says coffee importer Felipe Paz.

As for the survey's potential 'harm' to city's the coffee business, "This is just motivation to me and my coffee colleagues to put Houston on the map and stamp-out any sort of negative connotation when it comes to Houston and coffee," says Fallen.

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Clever last looked at coffee in 2022 when Houston finished 29th in the country. The most significant change was in price.

This year, San Antonio and Dallas are also among the nation's ten-worst coffee cities. Austin was ranked 13th best.

For those looking for a road trip, Portland, Oregon, gets top honors as the best coffee city in the country.

To view the full survey from Clever Real Estate, click here.